Does Jeff Sessions Have a Memory Problem?

The attorney general doesn’t recall.

96252586

Jeff Sessions solemnly swears to not recall, not have recollection, and reveal nothing but the lack of recollection, so help him God.

By Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Presumably under pressure to protect the president without perjuring himself, Attorney General Jeff Sessions found new and creative ways to deflect hours of probing questions by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, most of which amounted to a variation on a familiar theme: “I don’t recall.”

In his opening remarks, Sessions explained that he “[did] not have any recollection of meeting or talking to the Russian ambassador or any Russian official” outside of the two conversations he had already disclosed. If other interactions had happened, he said, as former F.B.I. director James Comey reportedly testified may have occurred at the Mayflower Hotel last year, he “did not remember it.” Pressed by the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard Burr, Sessions seemed apologetic about his memory. “I stretched my—wracked my brain to make sure I could answer any of these questions properly,” he said. But he could not recall.

Asked by Senator John Warner to recall his two conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Sessions could not. “Certainly I can assure you, nothing improper, if I had had a conversation with him. And it’s conceivable that that occurred. I just don’t remember it.”

Warner followed up: “But there was nothing in your notes or memory so that when had a chance to correct the record about the other two sessions in response to Senator [Al] Franken and Senator [Patrick] Leahy, this one didn’t pop into your memory, that in an overabundance of caution, that you ought to report this session as well?” Sessions replied that he “possibly had a meeting, but I still do not recall it.”

Senator Kamala Harris cut straight to the point in her first question: “Just on the first page of your three pages of written testimony, you wrote ‘nor I do recall,’ ‘do not have recollection,’ ‘do not remember it.’ My question is, for any of your testimony today, did you refresh your memory with any written documents be they your calendar, written correspondence, e-mails, notes of any sort?” Sessions replied that he had tried, but that the entire Trump campaign was an “extraordinary” experience. “You’re moving so fast that you don’t keep notes,” he said.

By the end of the hearing, the attorney general had testified under oath that he did not recall more than 30 times.

At one point, Sessions invoked his “right” not to answer questions because President Donald Trump might theoretically invoke executive privilege in the future—a “right,” Senator Angus King noted, that does not exist. If the president hasn’t asserted privilege, King argued, correctly, Sessions cannot claim its blanket protection.

“I am protecting the right of the president to assert it if he chooses,” he replied, making a convoluted argument that he wouldn’t want to retroactively deny the president’s option to invoke executive privilege for Sessions’s past statements in the future. King told him he was trying to have it both ways and was being “selective.”

At other times, Sessions explained that he was merely out of the loop. When Warner asked him about whether he had confidence in the ability of special counsel Robert Mueller to conduct his investigation “fairly and impartially,” Sessions said he knew nothing about the investigation and had cut himself off from it due to his recusal. “I’m not going to discuss any hypotheticals or what might be a factual situation in the future that I’m not aware of today, because I know nothing about the investigation,” he firmly told Warner. Prompted by Burr to say that he had never been briefed about the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian election interference, Sessions responded in the affirmative. He said the same thing to King: “I know nothing but what I’ve read in the paper. I’ve never received any detailed briefing on how hacking occurred or how information was alleged to have influenced the campaign.”

Sessions seemed to understand he was on the safest ground by not answering any question with any degree of certainty one way or another. His exchange with Senator Joe Manchin was a master class in the art:

MANCHIN: I’m going to go quickly through this. Are there any other meetings and any other Trump campaign association that have not been disclosed?

SESSIONS: I don’t recall any.

MANCHIN: To the best of your knowledge, sir, did any of these following individuals meet with Russian officials at any point during the campaign. You can say yes or no. Paul Manafort?

SESSIONS: I don’t have any information that he had done so. He served as campaign chairman for a few months.

It’s not clear where this leads us. Sessions declined to answer the most significant questions that Democrats were looking to get answered, said he didn’t recall many details, and repeatedly invoked hypothetical retroactive executive privilege where there is little legal justification for doing so. Perhaps most important, Sessions claimed that he knew so little about Comey and the Russia investigation because he had effectively recused himself in his own mind long before he made his recusal official when it was reported that he had undisclosed meetings with Kislyak. This may be Sessions’s litigation-centered talents at work—after all, he was a former U.S. attorney—or this might be a side effect of working with Trump, a man whose statements and arguments consistently bend reality. Either way, when Sessions insisted that he was “not stonewalling,” one had a sense that he was, in a twisted sense, right.

Get Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour.It’s our essential daily brief on culture, the news, and more. And it’s on the house.